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From: Reid Rejsa on 13 Oct 2005 10:22
Hi Everyone,

I've seen a few posts asking about the Marantz PMD-671. I bought one
last summer and thought I'd pass on my experience with it so far:

I bought the 671 in June to replace my TEAC DA-P20 DAT that had died.
Mine being one of the early ones, had an issue with transfering 24 bit
files to my Mac. I recently sent it in for the upgrade which fixed the
problem, but it now has a few, minor, quirks that show up sporadically,
but nothing major, and nothing repeatable. To their credit, Marantz got
the unit back to me one week after I sent it off.

There has been only one instance where a track that was being recorded
had a problem, and the unit gave me an error message at the time. I was
still able to open the track and play it up until the problem developed.

I would say that the weak link in this unit is the preamps. I use mine
mostly for recording sound effects and voice-overs in the field. The
preamps are a bit noisy (hiss), but to tell the truth, in practice this
has not been much of an issue for me. It only becomes a concern if I
need to record something thats low level and really quiet, and then I
can usually clean it up accepibly after the fact. In most applications
it's been fine. I've not had any problems with the preamps no having
enough headroom which I understand is a problem the 660 and 670 have. If
I need to record anything really critical, I'll use outboard preamps or
a digital mixer and go in digitally.

I mostly use it at 16 bit, but having the 24 bit option is nice if I'm
feeding digitally.

The line level inputs seem clean the few times I've used them.

I should mention that I mostly use the 671 with a Shure VP-88, which has
been accused of being a bit on the noisy side anyway. It's a easy setup
to use. I mostly leave the VP-88 in unmatrixed mid-side output, and the
671 gives me the option of monitoring the left (mid) channel only, so
it's not to weird to listen to in the headphones.

I built a 12v gel cel battery to run it off of, instead of using AA's. I
was a little nervous about how the unit would react when the battery
loses power. I was recording the noises my newborn makes when he sleeps
the other night, and I found out that with the gel cel battery, the
audio electronics will drop out before the file/drive system does.
Somewhere around 9-10 volts, my file went silent, but the unit continued
to record until I shut it off 45 minutes later. The gel cel I use is a
4.5 ah battery. When fully charged, it should run the unit for at least
8 hours, if not more.

I also did some other tests with cutting off the AC power to the unit to
see how it acts. It seems that pressing stop after recording a track
writes the TOC info to the card (I'm using a 2gb Microdrive). Once
that's done, the files seem to be safe, even if power is cut off during
recording another track (the track being recorded will be toast
obviously).

Generally, the unit is serving me well and does what I need it to do.
The preamps, while a bit of a disappointment, have been usable in my
work, and there are options for really critical applications. The file
system also seems to be pretty durable, having not lost any data except
a partial track once, and the unit let me know right away.

I hope this helps,

Reid
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